In her 2014 article in The Black Scholar, Darlene Clark Hine establishes Black Studies as a discipline distinct in method. Hine wrote her article in apparent response to Naomi Schaefer Riley’s specious attack on Black Studies as a field. Riley’s dismissal of the field was based on her selection of a few dissertations as representative of the field and her interpretation of them based on their abstracts (i.e. she did not read the dissertations and rather proudly asserted it was not her job to do so). Rather than engage Schaefer’s Chronicle of Higher Education article point-by-point (as many of the commenters did quite well, exposing the article for its vapidness), Hine identified five critical aspects of what she termed, “The Black Studies Mind.” They are intersectionality (“race, class, gender, sexuality, and location (geographic, regions, nation, space”)) nonlinear thinking (not expecting linear progression, and sometimes significant retrogression), diasporic perspectives and comparative analysis (freedom struggles everywhere), oppression and resistance (the value of incremental progress and veiled forms of resistance), and solidarity (not succumbing to the encouragement to engage in fights over territory and scarce resources), all with an emphasis on the changing needs of students.
See:
https://www.chronicle.com/blogs/brainstorm/black-studies-part-2-a-response-to-critics/46401